One of the things about Leonard DaVinci was that while he was a great painter, he was also an architect, a civil engineer, an astrologer, geologist, zoologist, an evolutionary biologist and a paleontologist just to name a few of his many talents! (http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/vinci.html)
How could one person move so fluidly between so many genres of Design?
What did he know that we do not? Or was he just an anomaly, a forerunner of the first marks of an ADHD, taken in with this or that muse and n’er completing a one?
By today’s standards, here was a candidate for the label known as ADHD or Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. His forays into the unknown were vast and quick, with little time for what we might call a full thesis today...and well OK, according to the real definition of ADHD he would not fit the overall description, but he did leave in his short lifespan of 67 years a lot of unfinished work. Wonder why!
What are the connecting factors that allow someone to not just study a group of intensely deep and complicated subjects but come to a point of discovering, as in some cases, what would not be able to be understood for several hundreds of years? Do we yet understand the implications of what he brought to the world?
This was a gifted and talented man who seemingly had to center on something more than just one aspect of design. One could reasonably gather that his motivation was to discover something more about the Design of the Whole in his passionate pursuit in lieu of being entertained by just a slice of it.
Sometimes in the seeking of an answer we come to a realization of a method of questioning, an approach you might say that begins to serve us in how to uncover a particular truth about something.
One idea is that with a certain amount of perspective one can begin to see certain things a bit more clearly, as when, after a certain point in time, we might realize something that we said set the seed for another event or a sequence of events. We can look back in our lives and relate, how because we took one step, other steps followed.
I took the opportunity to look up perspective in the dictionary, and it has a number of definitions, but two of which that pertain to our interest in this discussion are:
A: the state of one's ideas, the facts known to one, etc., in having a meaningful interrelationship: You have to live here a few years to see local conditions in perspective.
B. the faculty of seeing all the relevant data in a meaningful relationship: Your data is admirably detailed but it lacks perspective.
The state of one’s ideas and the facts known to one brings to mind a sense of centering on what one actually knows, not one’s opinion of something, or what another one thinks but the taking of an inventory of what is known to one. Facts are another way of thinking about truth not imagination.
How helpful would it be to have the ability to see relevant data in a meaningful relationship if we were to study any genre of design? This sounds to me like it would be a useful tool!
Interesting to note here is that sometimes we think that experience gives us perspective and sometimes one could say that is true, though it is not necessary to have gained experience to have a perspective. By definition it is the faculty or ability to see, to have a vista, the basis of which is in fact independent of experience.
Wow, I wonder what Leonardo’s perspective would be of today’s world? Stay tuned!
